DOOMscrolling: The Game

Summary

We’re all familiar with doomscrolling, spending too much time scrolling endless feeds of content that make you feel bad about everything.But sometimes when I hear the word “doomscrolling” it makes me think of two other things: the classic video game Doom and, well, scrolling.That got me wondering if I could make a Doom-inspired game in a web browser where the only thing you do to play is scroll. No moving your character laterally, no jumping. Just scrolling.So I made it. And it’s fun! Here’s a small clip:That’s what the game looks like. But here’s what playing it feels like:You can go play it right now on desktop or mobile. The rest of this newsletter is the non-technical story of how I made the game.The first time was a failureAs readers know, I’m not a coder, but I enjoy how vibe coding lets me turn an idea into something real. So naturally, I turned to vibe coding for this.It didn’t work.This was around nine months ago. I tried and tried, but none of the LLMs were able to help me go from idea to a playable game at all. Like, not even close. GPT-4 absolutely refused to understand that scrolling down a page means that the background should move up the page. I ended up with something kinda pathetic that didn’t even resemble a game. So I gave up, figuring this was either beyond an LLM’s skills, beyond my skills, or both.But then GPT-5 came out a few weeks ago, and I tried again to see how much better it might be at coding. In just two hours I had a very good prototype. I even made a little title screen for my prototype so it felt more like a real game:I described the game design to ChatGPT very broadly at first. I said it should work kinda like Galaga turned upside-down. But I explained that unlike Galaga, the player moves forward and backward rather than side to side, and that the monster’s position should remain relative to the floor. That and a few more details got me surprisingly far as a first step.For prototyping purposes, I asked ChatGPT to just come up with f...